Odd WW2 factoids.

@aequitas:

you woke my interest in looking up for these Flaktowers in Berlin and came to no results of finding the combination of the Bird sanctuary and the Towers.

Here’s one reference:

http://junebarbarossa.devhub.com/blog/784584-the-prestige-objective-part-i/

“Of course, in a manner of speaking, Berlin was defensible, and had been so since 1941. That was when, in response to Allied bombing attacks, the first of six so-called Flak Towers had been erected. Berlin was not, and never really was, a fortress city. These towers represented the only form of defense it was believed Berlin required in the modern age, and why not? The city was last taken by foreign troops during the Seven Years’ War. At Humboldthain, Friedrichshain, and on the grounds of the Berlin Zoo, these leviathans were essentially antiaircraft forts, perfect expressions of Nazi tendencies toward gigantism and grandiosity. At the Zoo, at the southwest corner near the bird sanctuary, stood the most formidable of the Flak Towers. Two rooftop towers, L tower for communications, and G tower for main guns, dominated the structure, 132 feet high, covering a city block.”

Another Tiergarten bird sanctuary reference, this one from the Cornelius Ryan book I mentioned:

http://diendan.vnthuquan.net/tm.aspx?m=175644&mpage=1

“Wave after wave of planes hit the city. As fast as squadrons exhausted their ammunition, they peeled off to the east, to be replaced by others swarming in to the attack. The surprise Russian raid added a new dimension of terror to life in Berlin. Casualties were heavy. Many civilians were hit not by enemy bullets, but by the returning fire from the city’s defenders. To get the low-flying planes in their sights, anti-aircraft crews had to depress their gun barrels almost to tree-top level. As a result, the city was sprayed with red-hot shrapnel. The shell fragments came mainly from the six great flak towers that rose above the city at Humboldthain, Friedrichshain, and from the grounds of the Berlin Zoo. These massive bombproof forts had been built in 1941-42 after the first Allied attacks on the city. Each was huge, but the largest was the anti-aircraft complex built, incongruously, near the bird sanctuary in the zoo. It had twin towers. The smaller, called L Tower, was a communications control center, bristling with radar antennae. Next to it, guns now erupting with flame, stood G Tower. G Tower was immense. It covered almost the area of a city block and stood 132 feet high –equivalent to a 13-story building. The reinforced concrete walls were more than 8 feet thick, and deep-cut apertures, shuttered by 3- to 4-inch steel plates, lined its sides. On the roof a battery of eight 5-inch guns was firing continuously, and in each of the four turreted corners multiple-barreled, quick-firing “pom pom” cannons pumped shells into the sky.”

Hi CWO Marc, lets roll it up from the other side. What is meant by or with Bird sanctuary?
Maybe it is a term for something diffrent what I ,by translation wasn`t aware of.
But ,as I said, there is no Bird Sanctuary in any of the German refrences mentioned.
Thank you for your answers.

@aequitas:

Hi CWO Marc, lets roll it up from the other side. What is meant by or with Bird sanctuary? Maybe it is a term for something diffrent what I ,by translation wasn`t aware of. But ,as I said, there is no Bird Sanctuary in any of the German refrences mentioned. Thank you for your answers.

I assume that “zoo bird sanctuary” refers to what is currently called the Vogelhaus Zoo Berlin (http://www.zoo-berlin.de/vogelhaus.html).  I don’t have access to a map of the Berlin Zoo as it existed in 1945, but one of the sources I quoted in my post #49 yesterday mentions that the bird sanctuary was located in the zoo’s southwest corner.  If you can locate a 1945 map of the zoo, you may be able to verify whether or not this was the case.  A current map of the zoo might also be helpful if you can find one, although it’s possible that the Vogelhaus has changed location since 1945.

@CWO:

Berlin’s huge Flak Tower G, intended to help defend the city against air attack, was incongruously located next to the Berlin Zoo’s bird sanctuary.

Die beiden Flaktuerme im Tiergarten sollten 1947 durch die britische Besatzungsmacht gesprengt werden. Am 28. Juli 1947 wurde der Leitturm mit 12 Tonnen Dynamit gesprengt. Im August folgte die erste Sprengung des Gefechtsturms mit 25 Tonnen Dynamit. Der gewuenschte Erfolg blieb aus. Die zweite Sprengung verlief nicht erfolgreicher. Erst am 30. Juli 1948 gelang es, den Gefechtsturm mit 40 Tonnen TNT zu zerstoeren. Die Reste der Tuerme wurden mit Truemmerschutt bererdet. Dieser Berg sollte in den Zoologischen Garten integriert werden. 1955 wurden die etwa 412.000 m2 Schutt wieder abgetragen und der Bunker selbst durch Kleinsprengungen beseitigt. Um diese Abrissarbeiten des Stahlbetons auszufoehren, war der Einsatz sogenannter Sauerstofflanzen erforderlich. Danach wurden auf dem Gelaende verschiedene Zoo-Gehege fuer Kamele und Nashoerner sowie das Vogelhaus erbaut. Damit ist dieses ehemalige Flakturm-Paar das einzige, das heute nicht mehr existiert.

You will like that CWO Marc,
It says (and I got it this time from wikipedia lol), that the Bird sanctuary was built in 1955 after they demolished both towers on the remainings of it.
Oh well…

Nice you two!

Germany’s “Vergeltungswaffen” (“reprisal weapons”) included not only the famous V-1 cruise missile and V-2 ballistic missile but also the more obscure V-3 multi-charge smoothbore gun.  It consisted of a very long tube, into which pairs of angled barrels containing solid rocket boosters were connected at regular intervals.  These charges went off sequentially as the projectile passed them, providing extra kicks to accelerate it multiple times.  It saw only very limited use during the final months of the war.

Fala, President Roosevelt’s pet Scottish Terrier, was almost killed aboard the cruiser USS Augusta while FDR was en route to meet Winston Chuchill off the coast of Newfoundland in August 1941 for the conference which produced the Atlantic Charter.  The crew of the Augusta was preparing to deploy the ship’s paravanes, which are anti-mine devices that are dragged in the water ahead of the vessel.  Paravanes are attached to a good many steel cables, which were laid out on the deck prior to deployment.  An officer supervised the proceedings as the crew worked.  When everything was ready, the officer prepared to blow a whistle to order the men to release the paravanes.  Just at that moment, the unaccompanied Fala came along and trotted right into the midst of the steel cables.  The officer saw him just in time and dropped the whistle from his mouth.  Had he failed to notice Fala, the Presidential pooch would have been torn to pieces by the steel cables as the paravanes ran out over the side.  Fala was picked up by an officer and delivered back to the President with a cautionary speech.  Fala’s subsequent excursions on deck were therefore always at the end of a leash, often with a member of FDR’s entourage serving as the official Presidential dog-walker.

There were more British and Commonwealth forces facing the Enemy (on the ground) than American forces in all theaters of the war until D-Day. June 6th 1944,  the D-Day landings tipped the balance and from that point on there were more US forces facing Axis forces than Commonweatlh for the remainder of the war.

Interesting fact.  This sometimes plays out on the Game board also….    :wink:

George Marshall, having worked himself to exhaustion early in his career, disciplined himself to exercise and to relax as part of his self-regimented daily schedule.  He maintained these habits even while he was running America’s war effort during WWII: he exercised every morning, arrived at his office no later than 7:45 each day and left no later than 5:30 each evening to go home and relax.  He once stated that no one had ever had an original idea after three o’clock in the afternoon.

Sometime in the late 1930s, under circumstances which remain obscure, a group of larch trees was planted in a swastika-shaped pattern in a pine forest in eastern Germany.  When the larches (which unlike pines are not evergreens) change colour in the fall, the result seen from the air is a yellow swastika against a green background.  The pattern remained intact throughout the war and undetected until 1992.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/horticultural-hate-mystery-forest-swastikas/story?id=19588288

Ever heard of the Triebflügel? It is one of the many wunderwaffe the germans created.

Here is a picture:

That is excellent Axistiger.

Marc: I had read about that forest too.
I would have loved to have seen that.

The Heinkel He 162 Volksjäger, a single-engine, jet-powered fighter which was built out of non-strategic materials and which could in principle be manufactured cheaply in large numbers, was optimistically intended to be so easy to fly that pilots with little experience – Hitler Youth members, student pilots, and glider enthusiasts – could handle it.  It turned out that the cockpit of any jet-powered aircraft was no place for an amateur, especially at a time when jets were still in their infancy and could most aptly be regarded as experimental aircraft.  A Royal Navy test pilot who evaluated the He 162,  Eric “Winkle” Brown, described it as very light controls and thus suitable only for experienced pilots.  An RAF pilot who flew the plane in November 1945 ignored Brown’s advice to treat the rudder with caution and got himself killed during an attempted low-altitude roll.

I just like these things:

The german Fliegende Panzerfaust (its name is already funny) was a german parasite aircraft, meant to be towed under a ME 109G. Its task was to be launched by the ME 109, then fire it´s rockets.

Once it had fired its rockets, the plane would split in 2 parts: the front part with the pilot, and the back part. The parts would land with parachutes, and retrieved to fire another day.

only one mock-up was ever build.

A state temperance society chapter lobbied to have the battleship Missouri christened with Missouri spring water rather than the traditional bottle of champagne.  They were unsuccesful: a bottle of Missouri sparkling wine was used at the ceremony.  Margaret Truman, the ship’s sponsor, would have been better off if the chapter had been more persuasive because the Treasury Department (which for some reason is responsible for such things) botched the job of scoring the wine bottle ahead of time so that it would shatter properly. When Margaret hit the prow of the ship, the bottom of the bottle dropped out and she and the admiral standing beside her got drenched with bubbly.  She was wearing a fur coat at the time, and in later years she said that the coat smelled like champagne from that day onward.

She was lucky it was Champagne.
Fur is murder!

Here’s a short one: In one of his earliest on-screen roles, actor Robert Mitchum appeared as a bomber ground crew member in the 21-minute 1943 film “To the People of the United States”, a public information movie about the sexually transmitted infections.

@CWO:

A candidate for the “most demoralizing code name chosen for a WWII military operation” award is Operation Gambit, which was devised as part of the naval component (Operation Neptune) of the Overlord D-Day landings.  The plan involved having a British midget submarine surface at each extremity of the beaches in the British sector before the landings, where they would deploy various signalling devices (flashing lights, radio beacons, flags and echo sounders) to guide the invasion fleet towards its objectives. The subs would have to remain in place for several hours, coming into full view of the German defenders once daylight arrived.  Prior to sailing on his mission, an officer who was in command of one of the midget subs looked up the meaning of “gambit” in the dictionary and was appalled to learn that it was a chess term for an opening move in which a piece (usually a pawn, the most minor of the chess pieces) is deliberately sacrified in order to gain a positional advantage.

lol… brutal.

Keep this post going CWO, I love reading this stuff!